Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is wicked and absurd

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn opens with a pink, pathetic, hardcore sex scene. Shot on a phone camera, it’s simultaneously intimate and embarrassing. It’s a personal tape never intended to be seen by a wide audience, but also one that is performative and pornish, as if made for some unseen and unnamed voyeur. The video, uploaded to a popular website, features a school teacher named Emi. Divided into three distinct parts, the film — which was shot and set during the pandemic — follows the trials and tribulations (featuring a very literal trial) of the teacher as she has to defend herself against the school administration and the blood-thirsty parents.

Dark and satirical, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn brims with non-sequiturs, revealing through humour and horror the unique paradoxical hysterical energy of the current moment. As the “drama” of Emi’s indiscretion slowly unravels, the sins of the past are revisited upon the present. The movie, so present and contemporary in style and idea, sees the way past ideas infect the present moment. The conspiratorial tone imposed against Emi for her private choices in her private life, broadcast against her will, reveal the ways in which the present moment has turned all of us into vicious, spittling narcs. It’s a movie in desperate search of truth in a world that seems specifically allergic to it. 

The film, very evidently, is a specific indictment of director Radu Jude’s homeland, Romania. It’s no coincidence that Emi is a history teacher with an almost encyclopedic memory for Romanian culture and lore. In the film’s final act, as she is put through an embarrassing trial, her knowledge and understanding of truth and history are repeatedly used against her. She’s condemned for telling history as it was, rather than as the peckish, conspiratorial accusers want it to be. She’s the only sane person in the madhouse, a cruel comfort that will likely cost her her vocation and respect. 

Yet, the film can also be read as a broader criticism of the way we live. The first section seems rooted in some version of the real world as we know it as Emi wanders around Bucharest visiting colleagues and cafés. She’s in motion and socially distanced, she’s thoughtful and engaged in some way with the materiality of the world around her. This section stands in stark contrast to Part 3, which seems to be a living and breathing Facebook feed; brimming with petty grievances, inappropriate laughter, conspiracy theories and all varieties of racist, sexist and xenophobic sentiments. A sarcastic indictment of our cultural and artistic deterioration, the film aggressively condemns all our worst instincts and obsessions as it articulates in the crudest possible terms Hegel’s idea that the only thing we can learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. 

Jude, like many other contemporary Romanian filmmakers, explores the ways in which languages operate within structures of power and control. The film’s middle section is devoted to a kind of alphabet of terms and ideas relevant to the multitude of ideas present in the film, from blonde jokes to the Orthodox church. While, in some ways, the most abstract part of the film, it is also the most exciting and provocative. It’s a quick-form lexicon of contemporary Romanian society, where it’s come from and where it’s going, while also offering a meta-commentary on the cinematic form that Jude employs in this film — exploring the intersection of myth, exploitation and cinema and its role in truth-telling.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is a wicked and often angry film that seems exasperated by our utter failure to communicate. It’s sharp and hilarious, whimsical and aggressive. It’s a movie that takes the blunt perversity of porn to its absurdist limits as it explores and tears down the fundamental values of an utterly broken society (Romania and, well, our online lives). Radu Jude has already made some of the best films of the 21st century (for my money, Scarred Hearts may be the best film of the past 20 years) and this film easily proves why he’s one of the few revolutionary filmmakers working right now. ■

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn opens at Cinéma Moderne (5150 St-Laurent) on Friday, Nov. 26.

---

For more film and TV coverage, please visit the Film & TV section.